Standard Model Milestone

On Tuesday 17 October at 16:30, physicist Steven Weinberg gave a lecture that was livestreamed to ICTP and the world to mark the 50th anniversary of his 1967 paper, “A Model of Leptons”. In his lecture, which is titled "Reminiscences of the Standard Model", Weinberg described the path that led him to the electroweak theory of Salam and himself, and what happened afterwards.


A recording of the livestream is available below and on ICTP's YouTube page.

Weinberg's paper, in which he presented his work on the unification of weak and electromagnetic interactions, played a seminal role in the development of the Standard Model of particle physics. Together with ICTP founder Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow, Weinberg won the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for contributions to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles.

Weinberg’s research has extended over many areas of theoretical physics, especially in the theory of elementary particles and in cosmology. In recent years, he has been concerned with the fundamentals of quantum mechanics, and in particular whether any viable generalization of quantum mechanics is possible. He has also returned to his concern with cosmology, working with Raphael Flauger on a new project: to evaluate the effects of intervening matter on gravitational radiation from distant sources, such as gravitational waves from coalescing black holes discovered by the LIGO observatory and from quantum fluctuations in the early universe.